Racism is an ugly blotch on our American ideals

In the movie South
Pacific there is a particularly poignant moment when Nellie meets Emile’s
children from his first wife. She is very much interested in marrying Emile but
Emile has kept his children from her sight until this moment. With a look of
disdain Nellie backs away from Emile and cannot marry him because the children
are brown. Emile then sings “You have to be carefully taught” to be prejudiced.
Nellie’s inability to accept the children came from what she was taught about
being white and the privileges that go with that. Let this be the backdrop for
today’s column about divisions in our society.

Racist comments

Senate
Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), said in a private conversation in 2008 that
the country was ready to elect a black man as President, especially one like
Obama who is “light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he
wanted to have one,” according to the Christian
Science Monitor (1). President Obama accepted Reid’s apology. Others called
for Reid’s resignation, comparing his commentsto Trent Lott’s public statement that “we wouldn't have had all these
problems over all these years” ifthe
segregationist Strom Thurmond had won the Presidency in 1948. (2)

Distinguished
black men like Boyce Watkins, a professor of finance and social commentator at SyracuseUniversity, and op-ed columnist Leonard
Pitts, Jr. said that Reid was merely expressing the state of political
landscape when he made those comments. (1)It was in no way a degradation of Obama or black people, but Pitts
mildly chastised Reid for using the word Negro which went out of the American
vocabulary a half century ago. (3) Lott on the other hand was extolling
segregation.

Haiti

A popular
talk personality said that President Obama and his administration will use the Haiti
earthquake “to burnish their … credibility with the black community, in the
light-skinned and black-skinned community in this country.” (4) These comments
are racist and inflammatory.

A Christian
pastor said on his national TV show that Haiti brought the devastation on
itself because its leaders had made a pact with the devil in 1791 in return for
their independence. But even if that alleged agreement was made, it ended in
1991, nearly twenty years ago. (5) This pastor’s comments are racially
offensive and religiously insensitive.

Racism

We have
generally described racism as hatred or discrimination against a race other
than one’s own. But as the Anatomy of
Peace says, “'If you see people of a particular race or culture as objects
… your view of them is racist, whatever your color or lack of color or your
power or lack of power.” It applies to “all divisions, whether between rich and
poor, old and young, educated and uneducated, religious and nonreligious,
Catholic and Protestant, Shia and Sunni.” (6)

Recently South Carolina Lt. Gov.
André Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. likened “the poor to stray
animals.” And his grandmother taught him not to feed stray animals because
“they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person
ample food supply.” (7)That’s racism
too. His comments scarcely received public notice, much less criticism.

Many people
have called for a dialog on race in this country. Candidate Obama took up this
challenge when he delivered a remarkable address on race in Philadelphia in 2008 (8). Some say he is not
doing enough and others say he is talking about race too much. I hope he
accepts the challenge to engage us in a dialog about race.

White identity

Being white in America means being a member of the
majority and dominant race and it is more than being white skinned. Thandeka,
associate professor of theology and culture, Meadville/Lombard Theological
School, shed new light on the issue of racism in studies regarding white
identity (9). There is an identity that goes with being white. For example, a
person’s natural instinct is to reach out to others without any racial or class
considerations. When this instinct is disrupted by parents or other adults who
do not want whites associating with other races, there develops a self betrayal
for stifling one’s own natural feelings. This self betrayal is then expressed
as disgust for another race. It is not enough to be white but that whiteness
must be expressed in separation from black people (or brown, red, yellow for
that matter).Adults too can stifle
natural feelings of affection and thus engender the same self-betrayal.

This white
identity becomes so deeply engrained that poor whites do not even recognize
their natural solidarity with poor people of other races. Even though both
groups share the same condition, whites fail to see it and distance themselves
socially as well. As whites grow up they don’t even recognize this
characteristic of being white. Thandeka. further wrote that this white identity
allowed whites socially and legally “to taunt, police, humiliate, mob, rape,
lynch, jibe, rob, jail, mutilate, and burn” black people. White identity
camouflaged the immorality of these actions. Some of these are dramatically
described in a recent novel called The
Help.

I have a
dream, to paraphrase Martin Luther King’s famous speech, that one day people
will see each other as human beings, regardless of race, gender, religious
affiliation, country of origin, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. May that day
come soon.

Has the prayer allegedly used which sounds like a prayer to
God, not Satan. Site also debunks other claims about this alleged “pack with
the devil:. The natives rejected the Christian God as oppressive.

``He'' is South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer, running for governor
on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently
told an audience, ``My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she
told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because
they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person
ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too
much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail
that type of behavior. They don't know any better.''